A Chinese Dream V&A Museum, London

Details

A Chinese Dream V&A Museum, London

Date: 2010

Measurements: 2.6m x 2.2 metres

Description: This quilt is stitched and edged in ribbon, it contains an image of a world map in the centre. 'A Chinese Dream' was commissioned by the V&A for this exhibition and it's now in their collection.

Material: recycled Chinese money notes, cotton thread, red ribbon

Provenance: Victoria & Albert Museum,

Notes: Stockwell’s beautiful, yet subversive quilt uses paper products to form a visual treatise on the Chinese economy. The quilt has been created from one of the most transferable and anonymous paper objects within contemporary society: money. Through the careful selection of various newer and worn Chinese bank notes Stockwell forms a visually arresting piece that is at once a fluid, scale-like surface, and a political statement of the importance of China to the global trade network. Following a recent visit to the country, Stockwell observed how fast moving it's economy is and how this scale of growth contributes to China’s global power, particularly in the textile trade.
This piece is one of a series of quilts by Stockwell. The last one, 'Imperial Quilt' was made of maps of the world reconfigured with the Middle East at the centre and a swatch of America woven into every continent. Gathered and collected, the materials in all the quilts are everyday and familiar and refer to the politics of trade. For Stockwell, the continuing relevance of quilts lies in their connection to a ‘make do and mend mentality’ where recycling and ecology are an inherent part of the process.
Stockwell chooses these industrial and domestic ‘commodity’ materials because, in her words, they contain ‘stains of existence’ and ‘act as ready-made signifiers’ which she can sculpt and interweave in ways that delicately reveal their obscured politics and hidden beauty. Susan said,
"While working in China and Taiwan (2006-8) I became fascinated by the incredible energy generated by the rapid rate of change. The quilt 'A Chinese Dream' is a result of my experiences and questions whether the Chinese are living their dream in the way that the American's lived theirs 50 years ago.
I stitched and crafted almost 1000 money notes into a patterned, quilted map of the world. The piece refers to trade, ecology, geo-politics. For me personally it’s a beautiful, hand-made quilt stemming from a tradition of women recycling old clothes, passing on keepsakes and sharing in a familial process that transcends generations. Ironically the ritual processes involved in making a quilt seem to counter the crassness and inevitable corruption of money and consumerism. Money by its very nature is recycled; it’s covered with the residue of many hands, pockets and purses – what I call the Stains of Existence..... Yet we seldom think about what this everyday material actually is and consider our complex relationship with it."